This is a podcast for the curious. Strap yourself in for genuine dialogues with people who think deeply and are ready to tackle the big questions, such as broadcaster Terry O'Reilly, fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay, and journalist Sally Armstrong.

Elizabeth Hay is a Giller Prize-winning author of novels such as
Late Nights on Air, His Whole Life, and Alone in the Classroom.
Most recently, she published a memoir about her parents' final
years in Ottawa: All Things Consoled. She has been writing since
she was fifteen, and also spent ten years working as a radio
broadcaster, living in Yellowknife, Winnipeg, Toronto and Latin
America.

Ben sits down with Elizabeth in her Ottawa home to talk about
her books, her writing process, and much more.

About the Guest

I was born in 1951 in a beautiful part of the world. Owen Sound,
Ontario, is on the southern shores of Georgian Bay. When I was
five, we moved about twenty miles north to Wiarton on the Bruce
Peninsula, a small town defined by limestone cliffs, icy water,
poison ivy and an abundance of colourful characters. I roamed as
freely around Wiarton as I did through books. My otherwise strict
parents let me read whatever I wanted to.

With Eric Friesen at The Lodge on Amherst Island, April
2008.

My father was the high-school principal. My mother painted in
her spare time, not that she had much time, since I was one of four
children. The public library was almost a second home, a place in
which I didn’t have to set the table or do the dishes or cope with
being teased. I read good and bad alike. We had no television until
I was nine, when we inherited my grandmother’s television set and
were allowed to watch it for two hours a week. It stopped working
after a few years and was never replaced.

Then when I was almost ten, we moved inland and about a hundred
miles south to another small town, this one on the edge of Alice
Munro country. My five years in flat, agricultural Mitchell were
probably the worst in my life—the years of puberty, unpopularity,
self-consciousness. When I was fourteen, everything changed. Out of
the blue my father moved us to London, England for a year and the
world opened up in a thrilling way. I saw places every reader
dreams about—the British countryside and famous cities—and I went
to plays, ballet, art galleries, to Covent Garden as it used to be.
That year I attended Camden School for Girls, where by accident (a
random English assignment) I discovered that I could write poetry
of a sort.

A year later we came back to Canada, settling in Guelph,
Ontario, where I finished high school. My years at the University
of Toronto convinced me that what I needed was not academia but the
real world. At the end of second year, I hitchhiked to
Newfoundland, and at the beginning of third year I dropped out for
a year and took the train to the west coast, eventually making my
way to the Queen Charlotte Islands, now Haida Gwaii. I returned to
university at the end of August and completed my third year, but
went no further in school.

After that, I moved west again, then north to Yellowknife in the
Northwest Territories to join the man who would be my first
husband, Craig McInnes. The northern photographs on the website are
his. In Yellowknife I began to work in radio. During the ten years
I was a broadcaster, I was a writer with a split personality,
writing to a formula for radio and writing privately in the
notebooks I began to keep. It took me a long time to see that the
clarity and economy and directness required to tell a story to a
radio audience would serve me well in whatever I wrote. After
Yellowknife, I moved to Winnipeg, then Toronto, and then I
freelanced in Latin America for a time, basing myself in Mexico.
While in Mexico I met Mark Fried and we have been together ever
since. We have two children, a daughter and a son.

For six years we lived in New York City, where I put together my
first books, Crossing the Snow Line and The Only Snow in Havana,
and gathered the experiences that I used in Captivity Tales:
Canadians in New York. Finally, my homesickness became intolerable
and I dragged everyone to Ottawa, where we’ve been since 1992.
Small Change, the collection of stories about friendships gone
wrong, draws on material from throughout my life and explores the
pain we experience in the name of friendship.

My neighbourhood is Old Ottawa South, the setting for part of my
first novel, A Student of Weather, and for all of my second novel
Garbo Laughs. The Rideau Canal is two blocks away, the Rideau River
an easy walk in the other direction. The streets look much as they
did in the 1950s. It’s a quiet backwater, which suits me. I like to
walk, I don’t like to drive and avoid it. The Sunnyside branch of
the public library is a ten-minute walk from my house. I use it a
lot. Almost directly across the street from the library is the
Mayfair movie theatre, in constant use since the 1930s. This is the
part of the world, not Ottawa but the Ottawa Valley, where my
mother grew up. It has a lot of emotional resonance for me as a
result. While I was writing my third novel, Late Nights on Air, I
was already making notes for my fourth, Alone in the Classroom,
which focuses to a large degree on the Ottawa Valley. His Whole
Life, which has the 1995 Quebec referendum woven through it, moves
between New York City and a lake in eastern Ontario. All Things
Consoled, a daughter’s memoir is about my mother and father at the
end of their lives. They both died in Ottawa, in a retirement home
a six-minute walk from my house.

From the age of fifteen I have been writing. The great struggle
has been to believe that I have enough imagination of the necessary
kind to write compelling material. I am dogged but self-doubting,
and happiest at my desk.

A quote from American writer Kurt Vonnegut: "Novelists have, on the average,
about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s
department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that
writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if
only that person will write the same thought over and over again,
improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like
inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it
takes is time."

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Your weekly podcast for a world in flux.
Globalization and climate change. The rise of social media and the decline and fall of Blockbuster Video. AI and VR. Donald Trump and Flat Earthers. The world is changing so fast that we can't get a grip on how we got here, let alone where we're headed.
Join Ben Charland as he peels back the headlines to ask, what are the events, characters, forces and ideas that shape the human story today? Have things always been this nuts, or are they getting crazier by the day? Who were those barbarians that took down the Blockbuster Empire? Just what on Earth is going on?